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Sleuth is an interesting experiment on character development and set design. I don't know how different it is from the original Anthony Shaffer stage play or from the first 1972 film adaptation where "Laurence Olivier tore Michael Caine to pieces in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s vicious screen version".

In this new adaptation, Caine comes back playing Olivier's role as the rich and bitter crime writer, Andrew Wyke while Jude Law plays Caine's original character, Milo, the handsome young lad who will be Wyke's adversary. Wyke and Milo are the only two characters you will see through the entire film as 99% of the events depicted will take place inside Wyke's house. It's hard to empathize with any of the two, and the whole movie can be a taxing ordeal if you are in no mood to dissect egos as big as the ones portrayed and protracted here.

It's a fairly simple plot: Milo visits Wyke's mansion to talk the latter into divorcing his wife who now has affairs with the former so that he can marry her. Unwilling to budge and taking his chances on Milo's lower social class, Wyke points out that a woman like his wife has a voracious appetite for wealth which Milo can never give. Milo is just an affable hair dresser and offers an absurd proposition. What follows is a wily series of verbal and mental twists, as each tries to outwit each other to exact humiliation, revenge and to uphold each other's egos culminating in an unexpected but rather wickedly developed twist in the end.

While I am in no mood to talk about characterization and how the two acted (because they kinda sucked at it--engaging but not brilliant), let me just say that the best character in this film is Wyke's house. The perfect signifier of modern architecture and design, the house is a technological marvel accentuated by the best modern manipulations of glass, steel and concrete. It was meant to be more of a display house rather than something to live in. It is also the best reminder of the invisible wife as the two move constantly inside this cold interior, unknown to us if they are conditioned by their own musings and imagination or if they are being gazed at and manipulated by the woman in-absentia. In any case, the house worked well, and added a multitude of dimensions in trying to gauge the depth and sincerity of the characters it tries to trap inside.

What doesn't work for me is director Kenneth Branagh's film rhetoric. It is confused and thoughtless. He overplays the sleuthing by making use of security footages taken from weird angles, but it's a bit inconsistent and a little all over the place. It's too tedious and a bit inorganic., making it even more difficult to make any emotional connection with either of the two actors on screen despite watching them intimately.